InDesign or Illustrator?

macrumors 6502a

I'm trying to make a poster that has a pin stripe grey background. Within the background there will be colored background with text in it. Pretty much like this website:http://www.rescomp.berkeley.edu/

Now I know that Illustrator is good for logos and InDesign is good for print work like books. But for posters with a lot of graphics how should I go about this? Design the background in Illustrator and import them in InDesign and add the text in there? Or do everything in InDesign?

thread startermacrumors 6502a

Hmm thanks guys! I'll try it in inDesign and get some feedback when it's done.

This is a really stupid and newb question but what should the sizing be for this? My school's printshop doesn't seem to have preset sizing for a poster. I'm thinking 2ft in heigh by 3~4ft in width? (Makes it even harder than InDesign is in mm)

macrumors 6502

Of course you can change your units in Illustrator and InDesign (Control-click a ruler-- you have to do it for both the horizontal and vertical in InDesign).

You can also enter any desired unit in any field (use the " for inches, mm for millimeters, etc.) and both programs convert the measurement to the default unit (you can also enter fractions, like 1/8 to get the programs to convert to 0.125, and even division: for example, to get the panel width of a tri-fold tabloid layout, enter 17/3).

Since Illustrator also has paragraph styles, I tend to do anything that is under 5 pages in Illustrator (which uses artboards instead of pages), but still offers almost all of what InDesign offers, plus the far greater graphics capabilities.

macrumors 68040

Hmm thanks guys! I'll try it in inDesign and get some feedback when it's done.

This is a really stupid and newb question but what should the sizing be for this? My school's printshop doesn't seem to have preset sizing for a poster. I'm thinking 2ft in heigh by 3~4ft in width? (Makes it even harder than InDesign is in mm)

Click to expand...

That size will cost a fortune to print. Give the print shop a few sizes and have them quote pricing.

macrumors newbie

It all depends on your design. If you're going to make any vector graphics at all, you'd probably be better off using Illustrator for those. Then import them to Illustrator, add your text, and call it a day. However, if you want to play with the text and add lots of bells and whistles, just stick with Illustrator. Also, in InDesign's preferences, you can change mm to inches. Also, also, if everything you make is a vector-based image/text, then you don't have to worry about resolution. It will scale up to whatever you want (business card to billboards and beyond). Pixel based images (like photographs, jpegs, etc) don't scale very far without getting uh, pixelated.

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